This invention relates generally to computer-controlled graphic display systems, and more particularly the invention relates to a processor and graphic system which utilizes the processor.
In graphic systems where geometric data is utilized for the presentation of images on a display, basic functions include coordinate transformation of the geometric data, clipping the transformed data to the boundaries of a viewing window, and scaling the clipped data to a rectangular region of the destination drawing device or display surface. For realtime graphics, special-purpose data processors or digital computers are required to timely handle the computation intensive tasks.
Special-purpose digital computers have been available in recent years for performing the requisite computation in graphic display systems. However, present commercially available computers for graphics processing are complex and expensive compared to architectures that could be structured to optimally utilize state of the art semiconductor processing techniques including very large scale integration (VLSI).
For maximum utilization of VLSI processing, the computer architecture must comprise a simple, repeating circuit configuration. Further, parallelism of compution capability should be available to maximize computation speed. Present commercially available systems do not fully utilize these capabilities.